Unbalanced

UNBALANCED

By Neil Hetzner

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Neil Hetzner © July 2011

Unbalanced

All Rights Reserved.

PROLOGUE

What, then, is love. A wind, whispering among the roses—no, a yellow phosphoresence in the blood. A danse macabre in which even the oldest and frailest hearts are obliged to join. It is like the marguerite which opens wide as night draws on, and like the anemone which closes at a breath and dies at a touch. Such is love.

It can ruin a man, raise him up again, then brand him anew. Such is its fickleness it can favor me today, tomorrow you, tomorrow night a stranger. But such also is its constancy it can hold fast like an inviolable seal, can blaze unquenched until the hour of death. What, then, is the nature of love?

Ah, love is a summer night with stars in the heavens and fragrance on earth. But why does it call the young man to follow secret paths, the old man to stand on tiptoe in his lonely chamber? Alas, it is love which turns the human heart into a fungus garden, a lush and shameless garden wherein grow mysterious, immodest toadstools.

Does it not cause the monk to creep by night through high-walled gardens and fasten his eye to the window of sleepers? Does it not possess the nun with foolishness and darken the princess’s understanding? It lays low the king’s head by the wayside so that his hair sweeps the wayside dust as he whispers lewd words to himself and sticks out his tongue.

Such is the nature of love.

No, no, it is something different again, like nothing else in the world. It visits the earth on a night in spring when a young man sees two eyes, two eyes. He gazes, he sees. He kisses a mouth and it feels as though two lights have met in his heart, a sun that flashes at a star. He falls in her arms, and for him the whole world becomes silent and invisible.

Love was God’s first word, the first thought that sailed across his mind. He said, Let there be light, and there was love. And everything that he had made was very good, and nothing thereof did he wish unmade again. And love was creation’s source, creation’s ruler; but all love’s ways are strewn with blossoms and blood, blossoms and blood.

—Knut Hamsun

Victoria

1989

Chapter 1

Hello, this is Dr. Willow. How may I help you?

"Hello, Dr. Willow. Kind of you to make the offer because it is help I need. How may you help me? You could cure me. Wave a wand and wipe away my ennui and anomie. Treat my alcoholism. Mend my depression. Bind up youth’s wounds. Staunch me. Center me. Purge me. Save me. Absolve me of my sins. If you can do that, do half of that, then, should I come ‘round now?

Sorry, Dr. Willow, just being my playful, satanic self. My name is Jaxsie Duerile. I specialize in being off-putting. I’m thirty-one and I was gloriously, but am now tragically fucked up, in the psychophilic vernacular. But, I’m trying to get un-so. Wicked trying. Wicked trying, that’s me. It’s why I’m calling. That’s why I moved up here from the Evil Island a few weeks ago. Keeping pupils undilated and hands steady were too hard in Manhattanland. At this moment, I’m clean and sober and trying to stay that way. I’m going to AA, which if not a comfort, seems to be a help. Is there anything else you need to know? Can you be involved in my salvation?

I’m sorry, Miss Duerile, but I usually don’t work with alcoholics. How long have you been sober?

Four months. Why no drunks? Fear for furniture?

It is my professional experience that alcoholics that are still drinking have a very limited capacity for self-honesty or insight. Many, if not most, alcoholics who don’t drink are sober because of Alcoholics Anonymous. Many of those in AA find that they don’t have a need for other kinds of help.

"Thanks for the typology. But, remembering my halcyon college days, idle among the ivy, for a schema to be of use, categories must be mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive. I may not fit into many or most. I heard an AA guy say that drunks, sober ones, don’t really listen. They care, they nod, they smile, but they really don’t listen. Their broadcasts interrupt mine. I need someone to listen. I run a lot of lines. Actually, today’s insight, I run so many lines I sometimes find myself biting on my own bait. In meetings I get those sober nods and smiles, but I can’t tell if they’re being polite, inattentive, stupid, smug, astute, or wise.

If I can find someone who’s really sharp, razor and laser sharp, and a good listener, then, maybe I’ll be able to see some shit I can’t see by myself, or see it faster than I would if left to my own devices, which are many and, too frequently, Rubegoldbergian and, way too infrequently, labor-saving. I don’t want to spend years tapping a white cane down the crooked path of my own life unable to see the past or future. Are you positively sure you wouldn’t want to play Sullivan, either Annie or Harry Stack, to my Helen Keller?

Have you been in therapy before?

No, I’m ashamed to say that neglected that as I’ve been much too busy getting fucked up.

Why start therapy now? If you have only been sober for four months, why not give AA some more time?

I’m not sure I can.

What do you mean?

I mean that everything is getting a tad volcanic. No booze, no drugs; Q.E.D., no relief. There’s a lot of ominous rumbling going on. Tremblors. Some steam. In fact, a lot of steam. Fracturing. Fissuring. Truth be told, which could be a first, I’m feeling quite fissile.

And when you feel like that, what do you think is going to happen?

I’m going to run faster, like Pompeinaneans, and believe me, I fucking well know how to do that, but, even so, if I don’t get some help I could get incinerated or buried in lava. Makes a great tourist attraction. `Just think, Emmie, it could have been you.’ But, not so great for me. Carbonized. Fossilized. Fissilized. Not what the high school yearbook predicted and who wants to disappoint? Do you want to take me on? Save a damned damsel in distress.

After a very long pause, Dr. Willow conceded, I have a client who is ending therapy because she is leaving the area. Could you come next Tuesday at 4:00 p.m.? We can talk about whether it makes sense for us to work together.

Great. I’ll be there.

Do you know where my office is?

Oh yeah, I checked it out.

Good bye.

Bye bye. Thanks for breaking your rule.

* * *

After hanging up, Dr. John Willow returned to his second floor screened-in porch where he had been reading an article on Eastlake furniture. Around him in the lowering darkness of a June night could be heard the small town orchestral sounds of insects mating, children playing, adults relaxing, and automobiles, lawnmowers, radios, and televisions working. A cat, probably the Fosters’, emitted a loud shriek down the block. The psychologist looked up from his magazine, but, because of the light thrown by the porch lamp, he could see little beyond the ancient blackened screens. He reached over and turned off the lights.

One of Dr. Willow’s small pleasures was to sit on his porch, but he preferred being the observer, not the observed. In early evening he could see out onto Pleasant Street while neighbors and passersby would have difficulty seeing past the black scrim of the old copper screens. Often, as it grew darker he would sit in the shadows with his eyes shut and just listen to the sounds made by those around him. After eight hours of hearing the intimate details of others’ lives in his office downstairs, he would come up to this porch to capture a innocuous piece of a distant conversation or to intercept the quick black shadow of a neighbor’s form passing across a lighted window. The good nights were when the sounds that filled his head came from sources off the porch. On less peaceful nights the sounds were the random turnings of the pages of his life. Despite his considerable discipline, the doctor could lose a night to musings and regrets.

At thirty-seven, John Willow had been a practicing psychologist for eleven years. He thought he had paid a high price for his profession. His light brown hair was streaked with silver strands along his temples and just behind his delicate ears. Years of concentrating on the surface and subtext of his clients’ lives had inscribed a map of furrows onto his forehead. The skin at the edge of his pale blue eyes had creased from untold hours of encouraging smiles, empathic frowns and concerned concentration. Dr. Willow’s eyes tended to look long without blinking.

Dr. Willow considered the phone call from Jaxsie Duerile. He loathed alcoholics. In large part, that feeling derived from the fact that his mother was an alcoholic, or, more accurately, two alcoholics. Before the dinner hour, she was a prim and proper alcoholic. With her knees together, lipstick on straight, and hair coiffed, she sipped slowly as she delivered her cleverly mean judgments. After dinner, she tended to be louder, sloppier, unbundled, more, the termagant. Not unexpectedly, the mother vehemently disagreed with the son’s infrequently voiced diagnosis. In counterpoint, oftentimes against an argument he had not have the temerity to make, she would argue that she never drank during the day. She never became sick from drinking. She never made an ass of herself—here Dr. Willow thought that his mother used an overly narrow definition of ass. She never left her sink full of dishes overnight. Her only son once had suggested that the admirable discipline of the last trait was undercut by the fact that she frequently abdicated any role as cook beyond opening a jar of olives and pouring roasted mixed nuts into sterling silver compote. For Mrs. Willow, these selected activities proved her normality. For her son, the fact that she became increasingly argumentative, rude, and inarticulate as an evening wore on, that she became a bleary, baleful bore, as he had once called her in anger, led to a different diagnosis. He thought that her passing out in a chair by the pool in her Florida condominium complex might be more relevant evidence than a clean sink. His mother, however, tended to ignore what she could not remember.

Despite his training and all the medical evidence to support the theory that alcoholism was a disease, Dr. Willow attributed much of most alcoholics’ behavior, especially his mother’s, to a malign willfulness. He couldn’t help believing that alcoholics became drunk and behaved the way they did because, to a greater or lesser degree, they chose to do so. His mother chose to go someplace each night to where the day’s quiet bitterness and resentfulness could metastasize into vituperative shrewishness.

Looking down through the clotted dark, the therapist could make out the etiolated, phosphorescent patches of his clenched knuckles. He opened his fists, splayed his fingers, and pasted them along the tops of his khaki clad knees. His fingers tapped disrhythmically as, not for the first time, he wished that he could have as much same emotional distance from his mother as he had with his clients. Dr. Willow wanted to be able to shelve his thoughts of his mother with the same neatness that he did with so many other things.

In the Victorian home where he had grown up as his parents’ only child, each of the five bedrooms had a large walk-in closet. Even as a very young child, John Willow had liked to keep his bedroom neat and spare by keeping most of his clothes and all of his toys in the big closet.

Willow inhaled and thought the sweet smell of a light breeze on a balmy June night was not so different from his childhood closet’s sharp clean smell of cedar and bleach. As a boy he had spent nearly as many hours arranging his toys, his shells, his stamps, and his clothes in the white walled, mullion windowed closet as he had playing with them on his bedroom floor. Dr. Willow recalled how he had stopped collecting shells in fourth grade after watching his friend, Tony Missoli’s, father prepare live conch for salad. It had disturbed him to realize that the creature inside the shell was so soft and plasmic that it must take the shape of its home. While his mother had often accused him of spinelessness, the boy Wiilow had never thought of its true meaning until that moment. The shells he had were and remained beautiful, and, if fact, were stored in boxes in his attic above him, but after that afternoon, when he thought of seashells, he could think only of the gelatinous forms that had lived inside.

Around the time when he stopped collecting shells, Dr. Willow began collecting the Victoriana with which his house now was filled. That once consuming pursuit had begun on the day he went to the on-site auction of the contents of the Purdy residence.

The Purdys’ rambling, white Victorian house was four doors from Willow’s family house. It had three stories, sixteen rooms, hinged green shutters, a turret topping one corner, and a three story bay window running up the right side. The raised porch, which wrapped around three sides of the house, had a wide railing supported by intricately turned balusters. As a young frequent visitor, Willow had learned the Purdy history. Judge Purdy had died before Willow was born. The judge and Mrs. Purdy had had two sons. Both had been killed in World War II. Jack, a tail gunner, had been shot down over France. Joseph had died in a traffic accident on a base in England. Twenty years after the war Mrs. Purdy still deeply missed her children, but it was very obvious to young Willow that Mrs. Purdy’s life went on. She was active in the Congregational Church. She volunteered at the hospital. She gardened.

Mrs. Purdy had been the boy Willow’s great and stalwart friend. When he was very young, she would read to him as they sat in oversized white rattan rockers. When he was sick, she would bring him baked custard with a crust of caramelized sugar and nutmeg. When he had some small success at school, she would praise him lavishly. When he was confused or sad, she would pat his shoulder and reassure him of the goodness of the world.

Willow was nine when Mrs. Purdy had her stroke. When he had visited her in the hospital, he could not accept that the small, gray, inert figure between the crisp white sheets was his vibrant friend. Neither her eyes nor her mouth, nor her hands, not even her hair had Mrs. Purdy’s vitality. The person in the metallic bed machine reminded him of a beached crab after the gulls had done their work. A crab-like shell, which when lifted from the sand, felt too light. Just too light. A form without substance. Although Mrs. Purdy remained hospitalized for two months before she died of a second stroke, Willow only visited her that one time. While Mrs. Purdy was in the hospital and later, after her death, young John Willow swept the walk in front of her house and pinched back the potted geraniums on the porch rail in the way she had taught him. He dead-headed the beds of red and purple petunias that ran along the sidewalk. As he worked he would feel the warmth of her love, the pain of her troubles, and his guilt from neither visiting her in the hospital nor taking something to her, such as a golden-crusted custard.

Dr. Willow leaned back in his chair so that he could stretch the muscles in his neck and shoulders.

Several months after her death, on the hot, dry, windy Saturday of Columbus Day weekend, Mrs. Purdy’s possessions were sold at auction. It was Willow’s first auction. As he walked up the sidewalk he was dismayed that all of the objects of the Purdys’ lives were being displayed on long plywood tables. Rivulets of people were flowing through the tables of smaller items and around the clusters of furniture. He saw two laughing teenage girls holding up Mrs. Purdy’s costume jewelry to their necks and ears. He watched in horror as a young boy bounced on and off an ottoman whose needle-pointed cover of red roses had been stitched by Mrs. Purdy’s grandmother. With his fists clenched, Willow had started across the yard to tell the boy to stop when a woman came up and grabbed the child by a hand. The way people were swarming around the Purdy’s yard and the Purdy’s possessions reminded the young John Willow of Danny Hillow’s birthday party when they had come back to the table after playing tag and the cake had been covered in ants.

Objects, whose provenance Willow had learned during cocoa breaks from shoveling Mrs. Purdy’s snow, objects which, for Willow even more than Mrs. Purdy, had very specific homes on certain tables or on certain shelves in the breakfront, objects that were intimately associated with peaceful, secure, late afternoon talks were arranged helter-skelter on gouged tables. Hands, rough, ignorant, and careless, were picking these icons up and turning them upside down to read their makers’ marks before plunking them back onto the plywood. Willow began to feel the same sense of wrong as when his mother attacked his father. Everything going on that day was very wrong. He didn’t think that a person’s life should be strewn out on some barebones table in the clear, blue-skied, white light of an October day. Everything looked too small and unimportant in the clear light. Things should not be just put down willy-nilly. Certain things went with other things. As he walked down an aisle of goods near the left side of the house, below the double lilac, it seemed to John Willow that all of Mrs. Purdy’s shoes, jumbled together in old soft-sided grocery boxes, were too creased and worn. Armfuls of her clothes, still on their hangers, were carelessly thrown over the backs of two red damask slipper chairs. The clothes, too, looked so drab and worn that the young boy thought they could not possibly be hers. The only link that Willow could make between these lumps of faded fabric and his friend was the smell. The body in the hospital had been too loose and lifeless to be his friend, and these shoes and dresses and coats were too wrinkled and worn and too empty to be her clothes.

Seeing what he saw had caused young John Willow to begin to understand what death meant, how much of a going away it was. His eyes had brimmed with the seeds of tears before he controlled himself. Despite the hours and years of listening, despite divorces and abuse, sickness and four suicides, Dr. Willow’s eyes had not needed to tear since he had begun his practice.

After wandering the furniture-filled yard and the empty house feeling more alone than he had ever felt before, Willow took a sentry post leaning against the yard’s biggest maple tree. After the auction started and the Purdys’ possessions began passing into the hands of strangers, the boy found himself distracted by a slow shower of yellow leaves upon the crowd. The eager buyers seemed to be oblivious to the sloughing off of summer that the maples were doing. As he watched the raining of the leaves and the scattering of the Prurdy’s home, Willow could feel his money, some a gift from his father, the rest given to him by Mrs. Purdy for chores done, wage a war in his pocket. Certainly, his pockets had never before held so much money. As a Willow, he had been taught and re-taught that money was something very precious, something to be guarded and nurtured. He had been taught before spending money he was to very carefully consider all of the pluses and minuses before making a decision. At the auction, however, Willow discovered that at an auction there was no time for consideration. If he did not buy something at the moment, it would not be available later. It seemed to Willow that it was only seconds between when a lamp or stack of dishes was held up and the auctioneer spewed his incomprehensible words and when the runner carried the prize to its new owner.

Young Willow grew ever more anxious as ever more things, things which he had seen or touched, sat on or heard the story of, eaten from or read under, had disappeared from the Purdys’ lives. The boy knew that he had to buy something. It was critical that he save something of Mrs. Purdy for himself, and it was even more important to save something of her from the teeming crowd of strangers. The auctioneer, a heavyset man with a raspy voice and a quick, mean snicker, held up two dark wooden boxes. One box held a man’s grooming kit. Fitted into the gray, stained suede-lined indentations were a tortoise-shell-handled brush and comb, nail file and scissors and a straight razor. The other box was lined in red suede. It held a silver-accented comb, brush, mirror, a long hook, which Willow learned was a button hook, scissors, and a nail file. The auctioneer called choice and privilege and began the bidding. His hand, two fingers extended, danced over the crowd like a conductor’s baton as it acknowledged bids.

Twenty. Twenty-five and, now, thirty. Who’ll give me thirty?

Willow had been waving his hand high above his head but the auctioneer did not seem to notice.

All in at twenty-five? Going once.

The young frantic Willow stepped away from the safety of the maple tree and was surprised to hear himself yell, Me! Here! Thirty!, as he continued waving his hand. The boy, who had been taught to be seen and not heard, was embarrassed at the public nuisance that he supposed he was making by shouting, but, simultaneously, he was disappointed that no one seemed to be looking in his direction. For a mo0ment, he wondered if he only thought he was shouting. It was hard to tell. Even if he couldn’t hear himself in the crowd, he certainly could feel his heart racing and his legs felt as wobbly as a screen door spring.

Going twice at twenty-five. Who’ll give me thirty?

Willow put both arms above his head and waved them back and forth as though he were doing jumping jacks in the school gymnasium. It felt incomplete not to be trying to coordinate his feet with his hands, although with his legs’ sponginess, it was nice not to have to move them.

Thirty? Thirty? Third and last call.

Willow screamed, Me! positive that his voice could be heard down the block. The auctioneer brought his hand down abruptly like a conductor ending a piece.

Sold to the man in the brown sweater.

Willow fought the quaking of his knees as he sagged in disappointment. How could he be so invisible? He always felt so unique. In fact, as an only child and a good student, too often, he had felt that he was on display. Now, when he wanted to be noticed, when it was important to be noticed, he was invisible, and, as a result of that failing, that part of the Purdys’ lives which he coveted was gone. The boy looked back toward the auctioneer through his tears.

The auctioneer was holding up the red-lined box.

The buyer only wants the gent’s. Does anyone want the ladiy’s for thirty?

Louder than he could ever remember having done before, Willow screamed, I do! I do! The auctioneer looked straight at him and asked in his gravelly voice, Do you have thirty dollars, son?

Willow nodded his head and continued to do so as he reached into his pocket to fish out his money.

Sold to the boy under the tree.

The utter disappointment and miraculous second chance caused young Willow’s hands to tremble so badly as he paid for the dresser set that the woman with the cash drawer gave him an exasperated look as a trio of five dollar bills went flying. Once he took ownership, Willow he sat down on a grassy lump between two large roots of the big maple. For many minutes, as he stared at the backs of the legs of those in front of him, the boy rubbed the smooth grain of the mahogany case as if it were Aladdin’s lamp. He listened to the singsong cadence of the auctioneer as he exhorted the crowd and extolled the goods. Finally, after he had recovered his legs and composure, Willow wormed his way up near the front of the crowd. He spent the rest of the sale studying the auctioneer, the man who had salvaged a piece of the Purdy’s lives for him. Willow heard the phrase, ‘choice and privilege’ more than once and came to understand that it meant having the opportunity to take as many of a collection of items as one wanted at the price of the winning bid. He learned how choice and privilege differed from one, to take all. The latter meant that the bid was for a single item, but one was agreeing to buy all of the items in the set. He learned that it was that distinction which had allowed him a second chance on Mrs. Purdy’s vanity set.

Willow would not allow himself to look inside Mrs. Purdy’s case until he was home. Even though the boy was desperate to see and hold those things which he only had glimpsed from a distance, it seemed too important and too private an act to carry out in the middle of a crowd of strangers.

After the last item had been sold, Willow wandered around the Purdy’s yard holding his box. When the threat of tears returned, he quickly walked home. As he came in the door, Willow’s mother asked him if he had bought anything. When he showed her his new possession, her shoulders shuddered. She asked him what he had paid for such a disgusting thing. He told her, and she sent him to his room and demanded that he stay there until he understood what a fool he was.

In the youth’s closet, a wedge of the sun’s rays broke free from where it had been caught on the ebony bark of the walnut tree which grew outside the closet window. Everything—sound, movement, light—seemed muted after the energy of the auction. The boy sat astride his old rocking horse, Dapple Dan, with his knees bent sharply to accommodate his new height to the horse. He held the closed box in both hands. He felt the smoothness of the oiled wood. He rubbed his thumb across the intricately carved initials on the brass plaque. He pushed his finger hard against the rounded tops of the brass brads. His breath caught on the wonderment of possessing something that had been part of someone else’s life. The young boy thought how, by owning the box, he would be a link. All the Purdys were dead, but they were not gone. Their spirits were inside the box. Young John Willow brought the box slowly to his mouth with the gravity of a priest with the Eucharist. With its cool base resting on his fingertips he touched it with his lips. He smelled the mixture of lemon oil and Mrs. Purdy. He felt the slight vibrations of the Purdy spirits inside the wooden case. He held the box at chest level, intoned his version of an Indian prayer to be made worthy of receiving the gift of their spirits, and then, after carefully unlatching the top and opening the lid, he bent his head over the kit to inhale the Purdy shades and memories. The brush before him had been drawn through Mrs. Purdy’s hair as it had aged from thick chestnut to thin silver. It and the comb had probably been used on the nearly bald heads of Mrs. Purdy’s new born boys. Willow wondered if she had hummed the same songs to them as she brushed their hair as she had to Willow while they weeded a garden side by side? Had she used the mirror with its dented silver handle to measure the changing lines and colors in her face that Jack and Joseph’s deaths had brought? What part of Mrs. Purdy, some aspect that Willow had never known, had used the long handled hook?

Willow stared at the objects in the box and felt the spirits of a judge, whose look challenged the camera’s lens, a gunner in a wrinkled flight suit, a nineteen year old tanker, his pants tucked into high lace up boots, and a seventy-four year old woman of warmth and wisdom pass into him. Through the totemic powers of the oft-rubbed wood, the napless suede, the tortoise shell and worn-down pig bristles, he became a part of the Purdys.

Young Willow boy imagined himself as an Indian boy whose life was but one link in a chain. He would not be called John. His name would be birthed by his actions. His life would be shaped by the spirits of his new ancestors. He shut his eyes. Slowly rocking back and forth in a closet painted crimson by the waning autumn light, the young Willow thought long and carefully before applying the brush to his own hair.

That night Willow slept more soundly than he had since he had seen Mrs. Purdy curled into a tiny question mark on the starched sheets of the hospital bed. Comfort was behind the white closet door suffused in the warm custard light of a harvest moon.

Now, while sitting in the moonless dark of a warm June night, Dr. Willow shook his head at how magical a feeling it had been and, still was, to be able to take into one’s life the life-used things of another. Money and a morning were all one needed. The beds, dressers, highboys, gate-leg tables, sideboards, and sewing chests, the table linens, crystal, flatware and china, the lamps, paintings, vases, and fireplace fenders that filled his house had all been gathered from others’ lives. His rooms were filled with things from the lives of those who were gone. He shook his head. As with his home, his head was filled with pieces of others’ lives: His clients. His patients. The sick. The sufferers.

How, they suffered. From fear, delusion, self-loathing, worthlessness, anger, hate, pride, and guilt. They came to him. He tried to help. He did help. But one of the dangers of helping the sick was exposure to the sickness. Training, insight and detachment were supposed to inoculate one, but Dr. Willow had learned that exposure to all that psychic pain could have the same outcome as a physician’s exposure to his patients’ diseases. Doctors caught colds. They became feverish. Always there was some risk.

The longer Willow had practiced, the more days he had that ended in stygian nights. There were so many nights when his clients climbed right behind him as he made his way up the well-proportioned curving stairs. After a long day of listening to others’ ills, he would get no relief from their fervid, harried wheedling words. He would sit in the living room by himself and feel the room to be too small for all its occupants. The chairs and settees would be too few to seat all of those hurting souls who had followed him up the stairs to plead for more of his time, more of his understanding, more help, more healing. He was the moderator, the interlocutor, delegated by all those weighted down ones who had climbed after him looking for relief. With his insights and explanations, he was the fireman who was supposed to dampen the fires of immolating anger. He was the carpenter expected to shore up a crumbling self, worm-ridden with guilt. His wisdom caused him to be elected him to be the steady guide who could bring this one, that one and the other safely across the vertiginous bridge of emotional commitment. Like an embalmer, he, with his mysterious acts, was expected to sweeten the fetid smell of those panicked from nameless fears.

Some nights when work followed Willow up the stairs he would fight against his nomination of healer, savior. He would will the needy to stay downstairs. He would will those wraiths’ lives to stay within their manila folders until the proper ten minutes before the proper hour of the proper day. In the beginning years, most nights, his will worked. On those nights when it didn’t, which had become more frequent, he did as he had done this night. He crowded out the crowd with reading, or polishing cold silver or warm wood, or, sometimes, with a drink and, if all other distractions failed, by straightening up some memories of his own.

Willow hoisted himself up from the green metal chaise. Knees crippled by inertia, he had to grab the door frame as he moved from the dark of the porch to the light of the kitchen. He made himself a weak vodka tonic and returned to the porch.

His memories were in disarray tonight. A five minute phone call from a disturbed woman had caused him to rummage around in too much thought as though seeking something misplaced in a jumbled room. It was after eleven; it was time to